THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS
By Jonathan Coe
Alfred A. Knopf, 240 pages, $23.95
A middle-aged woman named Gill arrives at the home of her recently deceased Aunt Rosamond and discovers an empty Scotch glass, an empty bottle of sedatives and a set of cassette tapes stacked near a recorder and microphone. Read More
THE BIG GIRLS
By Susanna Moore
Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pages, $24
You’ve heard of the unreliable narrator, the antihero, the evil twin. Now meet the enigmatic heroine. Louise Forrest, the watery and tentative central figure of Susanna Moore’s The Big Girls, is a prison psychiatrist—a master of motives whose own motives are Read More
Clive James has a high-maintenance girlfriend: the reader. To educate this girlfriend, to correct her wayward mind and haphazard schooling, he has written more than 100 loosely related essays on artists, intellectuals and tyrants, mostly of the 20th century—a crash course in modern history and culture. His selection is idiosyncratic, and his structure organic, like Read More
At first glance, the cover of Susan Sontag’s final book—the almost-complete manuscript she left at her death in December 2004—seems antiseptic and ultra-modern, like an architectural photograph of the Düsseldorf School. Designed by Winterhouse, a small press run by her friend William Drenttel, it features a neutral vertical gray panel beside a photograph of Sontag’s Read More
In her senior year at St. Gallway High School, Blue van Meer fulfills the dreams of all bookish, lonely girls: to get in with the in-crowd, score a hot prom date, land an acceptance from Harvard, wind up as valedictorian and solve the death by hanging of a beloved teacher. Oh, yes–she also uncovers her Read More
In her senior year at St. Gallway High School, Blue van Meer fulfills the dreams of all bookish, lonely girls: to get in with the in-crowd, score a hot prom date, land an acceptance from Harvard, wind up as valedictorian and solve the death by hanging of a beloved teacher. Oh, yes–she also uncovers her Read More
Michel Houellebecq—the balding bad boy of French letters—has always written himself into his novels, giving his main characters his sad, unusual upbringing (his parents abandoned him and left him to be raised by his grandmother), his marital history, aspects of his employment history and even, in two instances, his name. His fourth novel, The Possibility Read More
Michel Houellebecq—the balding bad boy of French letters—has always written himself into his novels, giving his main characters his sad, unusual upbringing (his parents abandoned him and left him to be raised by his grandmother), his marital history, aspects of his employment history and even, in two instances, his name. His fourth novel, The Possibility Read More
The typical protagonist of a George Saunders story is a sad sack with a humiliating job (often involving a costume), a hot-to-trot wife, a sick child and the threat of a pink slip looming. Cutbacks at work lead to further humiliations. Finally, the wife, the boss or the co-workers insist that the protagonist prove his Read More
The typical protagonist of a George Saunders story is a sad sack with a humiliating job (often involving a costume), a hot-to-trot wife, a sick child and the threat of a pink slip looming. Cutbacks at work lead to further humiliations. Finally, the wife, the boss or the co-workers insist that the protagonist prove his Read More
